MOBILE, Alabama – As Mobile’s New Year festivities hit the home stretch, turnout was a mixed bag for the night’s entertainers, though spirits seemed to remain high across the board.

At the celebration’s main stage, just off Bienville Square, the Wet Willie Band and the Commodores played to large and enthusiastic crowds. Jack Hall, a Mobile native and founding member of Wet Willie, said after his group’s set that the strong crowd response had definitely had an effect.

“Just let them know that the warm hometown welcome was very much appreciated,” he said as the Commodores played and his bandmates packed up their gear. He thanked city officials, particularly event organizers Barbara Drummond and Ann Rambeau, for including the group in the annual celebration.

A couple of blocks south, unfortunately, traffic flow and quirks of the festival layout conspired to more or less orphan acts on a stage located in Mardi Gras Park. The Perfect Image Band had gotten things off to a good start but – broadly speaking – onlookers left the area for the night’s Mardi Gras parade and then moved on to Bienville Square afterward.

That meant that Elmo & the Bluesmen and Grayson Capps & the Lost Cause Minstrels wound up doing their best for audiences that numbered a few dozen people. The music certainly didn’t suffer, however, and roots-rocker Capps in particular made the most of it, urging listeners to come in close to the stage for a cozy experience.

“I don’t know about you,” he joked at one point, “but sometimes that Moon Pie reminds me of Stonehenge in ‘Spinal Tap.’”

The reference is to a satirical movie about a fictional rock band. At one point in the ensemble’s checkered career, it finds that stage props meant to be 18 feet tall have been built 18 inches tall, to underwhelming effect. In the first years of Mobile’s Moon Pie Drop, its illuminated Moon Pie was sometimes the subject of similar ridicule due in part to the distance it was placed from onlookers.

Arguably, it was just a matter of perspective. This much could be objectively said: Entering its final hour with no sign of the fog that blanketed last year’s finale, the Moon Pie Drop seemed on track for its best year yet.